Stephen Black wrote:
i) the extraordinary madness of the recovered memory movement which
took the Freudian concept of repression to new heights of absurdity
and, in the process, caused serious harm to many.Only a few years
ago, acceptance of this outrageous therapy was widespread in
clinical psychology.
You can hardly balme that on Freud. He was long dead, and the
proponenets weren't themselves Freudians in any significant way. Whether
one believes in Freudian theory or not, it was clearly an abuse of the
concept he developed (but hardly invented).
ii) the continuing use of Freudian-inspired projective tests in
clinical psychology, especially the notorious Rorschach, despite
ample evidence that they are entirely lacking in scientific validity.
I always find it amusing whe self-proclaimed empiricists diss the
Rorschach. It was developed pretty well exactly as an empiricist would
have wanted: numerous more or less random stimuli were tested for their
ability to separate among different conditions. Those that appeared to
do so fairly reliably were kept. Those that weren't were dropped (then
the publisher forced him to drop a bunch more because it cost too much
to print the full set). The results didn't hold up. So it often goes
mere correlation among observations. It seems to be a case study in the
poverty of "pure" empiricism" at least as much as that of psychoanalysis.
Regards,
--
Christopher D. Green
Department of Psychology
York University
Toronto, ON M3J 1P3
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.yorku.ca/christo
Office: 416-736-5115 ext. 66164
Fax: 416-736-5814
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